


cruel

by hydrospanners



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: (Really It Could Be Darker), Blood and Violence, Gen, Look It's The Darkest Timeline, Torture, sith!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-18 16:32:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14217222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: In another life, Nirea Velaran never reaches Republic Space. She never joins the Jedi, never steps foot on Tython, never finds an astromech locked in a cave and never trains a brash, bull-headed Padawan.In another life, Kira Carsen meets the woman her master might have become.





	cruel

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr.

Kira wakes to screams. She reaches for her saber on instinct, forces her aching body upright. The villagers—She needs to protect—She stumbles on her broken foot, pitching forward.

“Easy kid.” Her arms are grasped by a pair of warm hands, easing her back to her feet. “Not having the best day, are you? Maybe you shouldn’t be walking on that.”  
  
The accent is Imperial, and when her vision clears Kira finds herself staring into yellow eyes. Her fingers scrabble for her saber.  
  
“Easy,” the woman says again, eyes tracking Kira’s hand. “I’m not here for you.”  
  
She realizes the villagers are gone. The bunker is empty, except for what remains of that assassin and her pet monsters. “Where are they?” She demands. “If you’ve hurt them—”  
  
“Not here for them either,” the woman says.  
  
Kira knows better than to believe her. She remembers the Academy, remembers what it does to people. No one who survives it can be trusted.  
  
She drives her elbow into the Sith’s face.

“Fuck,” the woman swears, jerking backward and clutching her (probably broken) nose. “You— _Shit_. Fuck!”  
  
Kira ducks to her left, gritting her teeth through the white-hot pain in her foot, and makes for the assassin’s body.  
  
The Sith is still swearing when Rora Seake’s red eyes flutter open, full of malice. She smiles up at Kira, the cruel sort of smile she remembers from Korriban. “I bested you,” Rora croaks. “I was stronger. Darkness was stronger.” A wet laugh rattles from the assassin’s chest, dark blood seeping from the corners of her mouth, and Kira realizes the woman’s right arm has been severed from her body. It’s still laying right next to her, the hand resting on her stomach in some kind of mockery.  
  
She’s seized by the collar while her overworked mind struggles to put that puzzle together, hauled backward by the other Sith. Blood stains the woman’s upper lip, pooling along the scar that cuts across her face, but she doesn’t seem much worse for the wear. She’s smiling. “Not what I was expecting from a Jedi,” she says, “but I like it.”  
  
At their feet, Rora spits blood. “She’s no Jedi. Just a weak little Padawan.”  
  
The other Sith’s yellow eyes never leave Kira’s, but she nods. “Still just a baby. Explains how you beat her, Rora.”  
  
Kira feels her anger rising. She tries to think of Kiwiiks, tries to take deep breaths and think of the Code, but breathing hurts and this day has been shit and she—She feels every inch the weak little Padawan they say she is. Everything she’s done here, everything she was meant to do…  
    
“What did you do with the villagers?” She demands again. If she can just focus—“Where are they?”  
  
The Sith shrugs. “I let them go. Didn’t ask for an itinerary.”  
  
Kira reaches for them in the Force and finds them easily, their fear shining like a beacon in the distance. They’re alive. Alive and mostly okay. “Why?” She asks, not entirely on purpose.  
  
“Because they’re just harmless idiots trying to live in a bombed-out swamp? Unless you know something I don’t.”  
  
What is she supposed to say to that? She knows Sith. Knows them better than most of the lifelong Jedi. The things they do at the Academy… Bloodshed keeps you strong. It keeps you sharp. It keeps your enemies afraid. Bloodshed is what keeps you alive when you’re a Sith. Who and why aren’t supposed to matter.  
  
“Here,” the Sith guides her to a crate and settles her against it. Without a plan to distract her, all Kira can think about is her foot and her ribs and the way her head is swimming. “You gotta stay off that foot, kid. Shitstain here did a real number on you.”  
  
Kira blinks up at her, stares into her scarred and bloody face, into her yellow eyes. All she finds is honesty. Honesty, and maybe even warmth. Like she might give a damn. Like in another life, they could’ve been friends.   
  
“Are you trying to turn me?” She asks. Normally the Sith do this sort of thing with torture, but there's a first time for everything.  
  
The woman snorts. “I don’t even want to be a Sith. Why would I ask you to join me?”  
  
Rora makes a strangled noise that sounds somehow angry and triumphant at the same time. “Weak,” she snarls, choking on her own spit and blood. “I knew it. Like your broth—”  
  
The Sith slams a boot down on Rora’s ribs. Hard. The assassin screams in agony as her severed arm finally falls away.  
  
“Go ahead, shitstain,” the woman snarls, all traces of warmth utterly erased. Looking down at Rora Seake, she is the hard-edged, cold-blooded predator every Sith aspires to be, crackling with power and rage and cruelty. “Say something. Tell me about my brother.”  
  
Rora only whimpers, panting and wheezing as the Sith grinds her boot into Rora’s ribs.  
  
It’s vengeance then. There’s no mercy or compassion to this Sith, just disinterest. She came here for revenge on Rora Seake and nothing else matters.  
  
“Too bad you let a baby Jedi kill your pets,” she says. “I was looking forward to seeing them eat you alive.”  
  
Kira finds herself at a crossroads. The assassin came to Taris to murder innocents. If that other Sith hadn’t shown up, she would have succeeded. Intending to commit an atrocity is not the same thing as actually committing it, but it’s still bad. And Rora Seake is still an enemy of the Republic and its people.   
  
But she’s defenseless now. Wounded and unarmed ( _unarmed_ , some delirious part of her snorts,  _unarmed_ ) without any allies or reinforcements to aid her. Killing an enemy in combat is one thing, but executing her on the floor of a dirty bunker? Rora might deserve it, but does that make it right?  
  
Master Kiwiiks would try to save her. She would try to talk the other Sith down and get the assassin to medical help. She would try to turn her to the light with mercy and compassion.  
  
Kira asks, “What did she do?”  
  
“She’s an assassin. What do you think?”  
  
“She tried to kill you.”  
  
“Doesn’t have the spine to come after me,” the woman says, running the edge of her boot around the gaping, ragged hole where Rora’s arm used to be. Teasing. “She went after my brother instead.”  
  
“I didn’t realize Sith had brothers.” Korriban wasn’t what she’d call family-friendly. Most of the other kids didn’t know their families any more than Kira had, and if they did they didn’t want to. The Emperor demanded loyalty from his Sith, loyalty to him and to the Empire. Having parents and siblings and children can interfere with that.  
  
“There’s a reason,” the woman says. “Passion may be a virtue but love is apparently a weakness.” She grinds her boot against Rora’s wound, and Rora begins to scream. Kira flinches at the sound, loud and shrill and absolutely agonized, but the Sith’s face is passive as stone. When she finally lets up, Rora is panting and gasping and writhing on the ground. Openly weeping, mumbling nonsense that sounds like a plea to Kira. “She’s not the first person to try and come for me through Rhese and she won’t be the last, but I’ve got to at least try and discourage them. Don’t I, Rora?” She digs her boot into the wound and the assassin screams again. The woman shouts over her, “I have to make an example. It’s what Sith do.”  
  
Kira has always wondered how love could be as dangerous as the Jedi say. Now she thinks she understands.  
  
The torment lasts for several long minutes. The assassin screams and begs and trembles. She weeps. She offers the other Sith the galaxy, promises far more than she could ever deliver. Kira knows she should stop it, knows she should at least give the woman a swift end. But she keeps seeing the fear on the villagers’ faces, keeps asking herself how many others. She keeps wondering if maybe Rora Seake deserves it.  
  
Master Kiwiiks wouldn’t stand for this. But if Taris has taught Kira anything, it’s that she’s never going to be Master Kiwiiks. She’s never going to be a Jedi like the others. All she can do is—All she can do is her best. She can live to see another day, live to try again.  
  
Kira rises.  
  
The Sith finally pulls her boot from Rora’s wound, the dark metal now smeared with bright red blood and bits of scarlet flesh. When she looks back at Kira, her face is gone gentle and all she sees is concern in the woman’s expression.  _Concern_. From a  _Sith_. “You okay, kid?”  
  
Kira pushes her shoulders back and raises her chin. She reminds herself she’s a karking Jedi. “Unless you’re planning to kill me, I have a job to do.”  
  
The woman blinks, once, twice, three times. Then she holds up a finger and retreats to the other side of the room, near the bunker’s entrance. When she returns, she’s wearing a sun-bright smile and toting what is clearly a high-grade emergency medpac. “There’s more in my speeder. I wrote the security code on the lid.” She raps her knuckles against a sixteen digit number written in a large, barely legible scrawl. “It’s yours. Get yourself to a medical facility and then get the hell off this backwater shithole. I can’t for the life of me figure out why you people want to resettle this place.”  
  
Kira takes the medpac, not really sure what to say. A part of her wonders if it isn’t some kind of trick, but the rest of her is too exhausted to care.  
  
“Take care of yourself, kid. And if you ever want help assaulting one of my peers,” the woman winks at her. Actually  _winks_. “Give me a call.”  
  
Kira only nods, blood loss and bemusement blunting the edges of her tongue. “Right,” she says. “Bye then.”  
  
She leaves the Sith to her gruesome work, Rora’s screams following Kira as she limps out of the bunker. There’s a sleek, silver speeder waiting, as promised. When she finally opens the medpac, she finds a holonet ID scrawled inside the lid, along with a name.  
  
 _Nirea Velaran_.


End file.
